To Ease

Then that town dissolved into the rest of them.

I had love for the Lincoln Navigator with the flat, parked on the cinderblocks for two winters next door. Across the street a concrete cherub sang everyday in the center of a bunch of sweet alyssum playing Ring Around the Rosie. I am the type of man who falls for a robin singing in a rhododendron bush.

I’ve not found a feeling that matches leaving. I like to go at night. People confuse stars for faraway places: but if you drive at night mercury spits from them and scars your hands for trying to open a door or worse you catch sight of people walking back and forth through a door. As though between two or three or so worlds. They don’t see you. Then recurring figures start finding form again in familiar faces. 

Like when I came to New Jersey before this all with a thing for a red Ducati. I’d start hearing it at night – the Ducati’s engine, the way I’d hear the Hansom boy singing. On that block several neighbors would begin their days working under the hood of their cars hoping a few tweaks would be enough for them to clank into the morning.

When that ended it was with you riding on my back on the bike. You said you were careful with words because as with all things they were made of energy and to mess with this form was to mess with a medium too big and precise—as vengeful and as sweet—as magical as God. You didn’t want to be a God who didn’t care. I was struck by how you said God and not Goddess. Once the words get said you can’t stop the chain reaction of events and thoughts that follows, and this magic dragged us closer and closer, until you had to and I had to and I started writing. And then it was me riding on your back out from the desert on the red Ducati into Las Vegas. I didn’t know where I was although I knew the name of the city and that famous fountain pissing gold on the strip. We went back to the desert.

Working at the small college, and you were at the Ivy school, it was a time of half-titles and titles but not of money, which didn’t kill either of us. I recall the traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge after I told you the affair and your response was: a few silent minutes. I didn’t know what you meant once you spoke and said, Wise, although I did know how cliché it was to put my hand on yours when you played the song right then. I would do that again too. Leap off the bridge.

If I am writing from a dead man’s point of view I am happy to say I knew before that.

That there was this us about us.

I don’t think lovers confuse anything except where to begin. But not how. I dropped you off and you flew out again. I was beginning to think maybe you only needed a ride in a car every so often, a long conversation where hardly anything gets said. The next day back home on my front porch the gingko light on the green-tailed leaves seemed like a trick hand. As a child, when a siren in the deep a.m. hours slowly dragging its light and song through the town woke me up, it gave me a good reason to go to the window and look out and even to say a prayer. The ambulance made its pure ride to ease the inured. There was no traffic at those hours and there was nothing to keep the noise at bay. Sirens delivered the sick and dying at a rate of a few per hour on the block by the hospital I lived on Uptown. And, I never did say a prayer for any one of those noises. It was sonic disturbance.

It’s not that I pray now. But there was I found a string of words that as well might have been a reason to get up and look and keep going. It started with a red Ducati. I think if I told you that then everything dissolved into or everything moved towards you in a reoccurring form, as your face kept repeating, you would be horrified.

What I liked was the kid across the street tall as the sweet alyssum who hurried up ahead to close the gate to their yard then open it for the sister and mother. The bald man next door working on his rattled Lincoln.

And New Jersey dissolved into the watery night. Little Atlantis it was.